Book review | Flora: Fateful summer recalled in new novel

Friday

May 3, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 5, 2013 at 9:24 AM

On the surface, Gail Godwin's luminous Flora is a quiet, simple novel about a few weeks spent in near isolation in the North Carolina mountains in the summer of 1945. Under the surface, however, run currents connecting the lives of the two main characters to those of dozens of others, present and especially past. (The novel will be released on Tuesday.)

Margaret Quamme, For The Columbus Dispatch

On the surface, Gail Godwin’s luminous Flora is a quiet, simple novel about a few weeks spent in near isolation in the North Carolina mountains in the summer of 1945. Under the surface, however, run currents connecting the lives of the two main characters to those of dozens of others, present and especially past. (The novel will be released on Tuesday.)

The title character is 22, a recent college graduate looking forward to teaching school in the fall. She has come up from rural Alabama to look after her cousin’s 10-year-old daughter.

The daughter, Helen, narrates the story from many years in the future. She can barely remember her mother, who died when Helen was 3. Her “acerbic,” alcoholic father, who hates his job as a high-school principal, has gone to Oak Ridge, Tenn., for the summer to supervise construction on a secret war project.

A week after Flora arrives, polio hits two of the small town’s children, leaving one dead and another crippled, and Helen’s father forbids her and Flora from going into town or having visitors for the rest of the summer.

Helen — as a 10-year-old, and even as an elderly writer — doesn’t know quite what to make of Flora. Quick to cry, utterly sincere, unsure of herself, Flora might be “pure-hearted,” “ simple-minded,” or both. In any case, Helen begins to get the sinking sensation that she is going to spend more time taking care of Flora than vice versa.

Godwin sometimes lets melodrama overtake her plot. The character Helen, however, makes the novel worth reading. Her uncertainty about where her responsibility begins and ends and the wavering sense of guilt she feels shimmer behind the events of the summer.